Friday, June 13, 2014

There are no doubt countless brides and grooms who have felt knots in their stomach when tying the knot. But according to psychologist James K McNulty, their gut instinct could actually be trying to warn them of future marital problems.

McNulty asked 135 pairs of newlyweds several straightforwad questions about their relationships. He then measured their gut-level feelings by flashing photos of their spouse along with captions such as awesome or awful on a computer screen and asking them to grade the word as negative or positive.

"It's generally an easy task, but flashing a picture of their spouse makes people faster or slower depending on their automatic attitude towards them," McNulty said.

Through measuring their reaction time he was able to determine their gut-level feelings. He found these not only differed from the conscious responses but also gave a much better prediction of the couples' long-term happiness.